M. F. K. Fisher - Here Let Us Feast: A Book of Banquets

PRAISE FOR M.F.K. FISHER

M.F.K. Fisher... brings onstage a peach or a brace of quail and shows us history, cities, fantasies, memories, emotions.

PATRICIA STORACE , The New York Review of Books

Food is what she wrote about, although to leave it at that is reductionist in the extreme. What she really wrote about was the passion, the importance of living boldly instead of cautiously; oh, what scorn she had for timid eaters, timid lovers, people who took timid stands, or none at all, on matters of principle. San Francisco Examiner

I do not know of anyone in the United States who writes better prose.

W. H. AUDEN , author of The Age of Anxiety

M.F.K. Fisher is our greatest food writer because she puts food in the mount, the mind, and the imagination all at the same time. Beyond the gastronomical bravura, she is a passionate woman; food is her metaphor.

SHANA ALEXANDER , New York Times bestselling

author of Nutcracker

Poet of the appetites. JOHN UPDIKE , author of Rabbit, Run

She writes about fleeting tastes and feasts vividly, excitingly, sensuously, exquisitely. There is almost a wicked thrill in following her uninhibited track through the glories of the good life.

JAMES BEARD , author of The James Beard Cookbook

She writes about food as others do about love, but rather better.

CLIFTON FADIMAN , author of Lifetime Reading Plan

If I were still teaching high school English, Id use [Fishers] books to show how to write simply, how to enjoy food and drink, but, most of all, how to enjoy life. Her books and letters are one feast after another.

FRANK M c COURT , Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Angelas Ashes

This enlightening cornucopia of writings toasts the pleasures of food, drink and celebration in literature... This is a refreshing, nourishing and fulfilling sampler from a connoisseur of a genre she has created.

Publishers Weekly

This is unique... a collection of excerpts from world literature, concerned with eating and drinking... Theres gastronomy in fantasy and nonsense, in history of pioneering, in regional writing, in studies of manners. And alwaysin her inimitable waythere is M.F.K. Fisher.

Kirkus Reviews

ALSO BY M.F.K. FISHER

Serve It Forth

Consider the Oyster

How to Cook a Wolf

The Gastronomical Me

Not Now, But Now

An Alphabet for Gourmets

The Art of Eating

A Cordiall Water

The Story of Wine in California

Map of Another Town

The Cooking of Provincial France

With Bold Knife and Fork

Among Friends

A Considerable Town

As They Were

Two Towns in Provence

Sister Age

The Standing and the Waiting

Spirits of the Valley

Fine Preserving

Dubious Honors

Answer in the Affirmative & The Oldest Man

The Boss Dog

Long Ago in France

To Begin Again

Stay Me, Oh Comfort Me

Last House

M.F.K. Fisher: A Life in Letters

The Measure of Her Powers

A Stew or a Story

Love in a Dish ... and Other Culinary Delights

M.F.K. Fishers Provence

The Theoretical Foot

For Norah Kennedy Barr

Here Let Us Feast

Copyright 1946, 1986 by M.F.K. Fisher

Originally published in 1946 by The Viking Press

North Point Press 1986 edition revised by the author

Introduction copyright 2018 by Betty Fussell

First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2018

Pages 37173 constitute an extension of the copyright page.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fisher, M. F. K. (Mary Frances Kennedy), 19081992, author.

Title: Here let us feast : a book of banquets / M.F.K. Fisher ; with a new introduction by Betty Fussell.

Description: Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, [2018] | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018008260 | ISBN 9781640090835 | eISBN 9781640090842

Subjects: LCSH: LiteratureCollections. | Dinners and dining in literature. | GastronomyHistory.

Classification: LCC PN6071.G3 F5 2018 | DDC 808.8/03564dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008260

Jacket designed by Nicole Caputo

Book designed by Jordan Koluch

COUNTERPOINT

2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

Berkeley, CA 94710

www.counterpointpress.com

Printed in the United States of America

Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Reader, youre in for a treat. Taste one page, and I betas with a potato chipyou cant eat just one. Were here for a feast created by an adventurer like no other, our unique poet-philosopher of the stove, Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher.

It was she who taught us that words are to be devoured the same way we devour buttered popcorn or a mug of beer; that while the need to devour something belongs to all animals, the need to have it mean something is entirely human. Pop that seed over a fire or ferment it into a drink. And celebrate human ingenuity in transforming the necessities of survival into the arts of cooking and eating, reading and writing. Thats what feasts mean.

Her method was metaphor, her aim discovery, her manner seductive. If she was close to having been born a California gal with a bold knife and fork in her mouth, she was also born with a typewriter on her tongue. And it did no harm that she looked like a Hollywood glamour gal rather than an aproned Fannie Farmer.

To sense how daring this author was in both subject and method, look at the momentous global events happening when she published this, her sixth book, in 1946. World War II in both Japan and Germany had ended. Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito were dead. The Holocaust had been unmasked in Dachau. Hiroshima had been annihilated by the first atomic bomb.

And look what was happening in her personal life in this same period. Shed buried two suicidesher younger brother and her second husbandand birthed two daughters, one illegitimate, the other by a third husband. Shed published both fiction and nonfiction books, written gags for Hope and Crosby at Paramount Studios, begun a couple of novels, and splattered the pages of the nations top glossies like Vogue , The Atlantic Monthly , and Gourmet .

Why in this time of global and personal tragedy did she choose the impossibly low subject of food? Particularly when American food books meant recipe books by either home economists teaching diet and health or by commercial companies pushing a brand. The big sellers were Trader Vics Book of Food and Drink , Betty Crocker Cookbook , and Magic Chef Cooking .

In contrast, she presented the countless feasts of other men at other times woven together by a voice of elegance, wit, irony, and laugh-aloud buffoonery, the kind of writing she attributed to gastronome Brillat-Savarin, who clears fustiness from the tongue of the mind like dry champagne.

To be savored, not gulped or gobbled like the fast food of instant twitters and tweets. We have to slow down to enjoy her banquet of selections laid out like a buffet table with a timeline that begins in Genesis and ends with Ernest Hemingway.

And with an arrangement of cultural dishes that places the bloodied altars of ancient Aztecs next to the Poison Tree of William Blake; the toilets and vomitoria of Petroniuss ancient Rome next to the royal feasts described by Samuel Pepys and Madame de Svign; Dickenss Christmas Carol pottage next to Connellys Green Pastures fish fry.